AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Malignant Rhetorical Virus

I’m seething with irritation that the vast preponderance of the journalists I’ve heard and read recently — journalists, the people who have been vaunting their professionalism relative to mere bloggers — have simply adopted the Bush administration’s sterile locution “regime change” for the coerced overthrow of a foreign government. Saddam Hussein is a bloody, foul tyrant, and Iraq would have to be better off without him. There’s nothing, so far as I know, to be said on his behalf.

But although it’s in the Bush administration’s interest to make the invasion and occupation of a hostile nation sound like the turning of seasons (you know, “weather changes,” “times change,” “fashions change,” “regimes change”), I would have hoped that journalists wouldn’t act as surrogate propagandists for the Bush regime.

Since Hussein is almost as bad as Bush makes him out (Bush still imputes to him an al-Qaeda connection, which still doesn’t work), honestly call it an invasion and overthrow; Hussein’s villainy would presumably outweigh the negative connotations of those terms. I expect Newspeak from office-holders, but I am still eager to trust reporters to tell us their best effort at the truth, not the spinning dialect of Babel from the towers of the high and mighty in Washington.